Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah receiving his honorary degree from the University of Cambridge
Professor Appiah, a decorated scholar, award-winning author, best-selling novelist, professor, and long-time columnist for the New York Times Magazine, spent one year at Cambridge University as a medical student. It was but a brief detour on his way to studying philosophy, the field for which he is known throughout the world. His words have touched thousands of lives.
Professor Appiah has written extensively about identity, race, ethics, and culture in books including, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, The Ethics of Identity, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, and his latest book, Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science.
He has been writing The Ethicist column for The New York Times Magazine, where he addresses readers' ethical dilemmas, for more than a decade.
We spoke to Appiah as part of our 25 Years, 25 Stories, highlighting Cambridge alumni as we mark Cambridge in America’s 25th anniversary.
Why did you choose Cambridge?
I applied to Cambridge because it was supposed to be very good in medicine. But it pretty soon became clear to me that I didn’t really enjoy medical sciences. What I really enjoyed doing was philosophy, of which I did a good deal in school, not in class, but just with friends and so on. So, I went to the college and said, “I made a mistake. Is it possible to change?” And they said, “Well, you have to do the first-year exams in medicine.” I knew what I really wanted to do, so I scraped through my medical exams. I switched to philosophy and that was just perfect for me.
As a major voice in public discourse, what worries you most right now?
What worries me most is the rise globally of a kind of nastiness in politics. Now there’s always been nasty politics. You just have to look at 19th century political cartoons, but the combination of the way the internet works, and social media works with that nastiness makes it very difficult for productive politics to happen.
How do you select the letters you will answer when writing your column, The Ethicist?
Most weekends, on Saturday mornings, I get up, and I brush my teeth, I get down to my computer, and I just start reading them, and I look to see if any one of them is urgent. And if there is one that seems like it's time sensitive, I try to answer that first. Somebody asks you a question, either you have an initial hunch about what the right answer is, or you don't. If you do, you try and defend what you think is the right answer by writing it out.
How do you defend an answer?
There's a set of questions I ask, which I associate with various philosophers. So, there's an Aristotle question, which is, what would a virtuous person do here? What are the relevant virtues? It's also a Confucius question. But the Confucius question, I think, for me, is, what are the relationships here? Especially since Mencius, within the Confucian tradition, the idea that what you should do depends on whether the person you're dealing with is your spouse or your brother or your sister or your emperor or your neighbor, has been a central part of their thinking. Then I ask the Kant question, which is, what are the rights and duties? Are there really any relevant rights and duties? Finally, there’s the Mill question, “What are the consequences of the various options for human and animal welfare?”
What stands out about a Cambridge education?
It's a crazy kind of education to tell an 18- or 19-year-old, hey, you're going to spend three years thinking about just one thing, but, on the other hand, if you've picked the right thing, it means that by the time you're 21 or 22 you know an awful lot about that thing. And you're a very competitive applicant to graduate school in that thing, because [your education is] unlike the Americans who you're competing with. They've got a broader but thinner education. So, I was lucky that even though I did make the mistake of going up in the wrong subject, my college permitted me to pick the right subject.
Professors Wole Soyinka, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah received honorary degrees from the University of Cambridge